


Two Boys, an Apple Tree (a Lie)

by AnotherSaturday



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Explicit Language, Homophobic Language, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-04
Updated: 2011-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-21 01:16:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnotherSaturday/pseuds/AnotherSaturday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He told himself how it wasn't lying. He told himself how they wouldn't understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Boys, an Apple Tree (a Lie)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for rs_games 2008.

_"We're bound together in innocence and guile." --Robert Lowell_

It is only another of his mad impulses, in the week after he arrives at the Potters', that makes him hex short his own hair. It is certainly no cause for concern. He does it in the upstairs washroom, just before bed. After, he studies his reflection carefully, running his hands over the back of his skull in amazement. Without his long hair, Sirius thinks, he looks deceptively wholesome. He looks the same as anybody else.

At his feet are clumps of black hair. There's hair creeping down the back of his t-shirt, a sharp itch that makes him jerk his shoulders irritably. He can hear James pacing outside the door. Every now and then he shouts something: "Fucksakes, Pads, reckon you've hogged the loo long enough?" or "Look, have a wank later, m'back teeth're floating!" Sirius ignores him. He leans forward, palms pressed to the cool basin, till he is almost nose-to-nose with the boy in the mirror, who looks like a capable, rather staid sort. He doesn't look at all the type to make a muddle of things. He doesn't look as though he's ever been uncertain a day in his life.

Sirius smiles at this boy, at himself.

Almost involuntarily, his shoulders twitch again.

The doorknob rattles, and James calls out, "J'you drown in the toilet, then?"

***  
The reason he's at the Potters' is, he's run away from home, or else been chucked out, depending on his mood when he tells the story. Sirius reckons both versions are true, and anyway they come to the same thing.

They come to this: a back garden in Godric's Hollow, all full of trees bowing under their burden of fruit. His first morning here, Sirius plucked an apple from one of the low branches, and nearly choked when he took a bite: bitter as dirt, it was. James had laughed till he was practically bent double, and then told him, "They're not ripe yet, you twat. They're not ready."

They come to this, tall grass tickling at his arms, almost obscuring his History of Magic textbook, which is alright with him. Moony and Wormtail've come down for the weekend, and Sirius isn't sure where the others have got off to, but Remus is sprawled out at his side, industriously peeling leaves apart at the veins. They've been swimming that morning, down at the lake, and Moony's hair has dried all wild and wavy. His shirt clings to his shoulder blades where they're still wet, jagged curves Sirius has the most insistent urge to trace with his fingertips, but he stops himself. A month and a half apart, and the memory of just how far things went last term, have made them that bit uneasy with one another. Instead he slams his book shut and says, "Only I don't see the point. It's already happened, all this rubbish. S'done. And who gives a toss which giant topped which other giant anyway? Can't they just write, _giants all kill each other in the end_?"

Remus shrugs. "I think we're supposed to... to take a lesson from it?" he ventures. "What not to do, sort of thing. So we won't go on making the same mistakes."

"We will anyway," Sirius grumbles.

Remus is smiling. He doesn't take his eyes off the leaf-skeleton between his fingers. "I think that might be a bit profound, Pads."

Sirius grimaces. He hates when people say profound things. It's boring, and a load of shite as often as not. "F'it was, it was only by accident."

"No doubt," Remus says drily.

 _Right,_ Sirius thinks. He gives in, lets one of his hands come to rest on Remus's back. Through the thin cotton of his t-shirt, the skin feels all feverish: nothing but the borrowed heat of the sun.

Remus closes his eyes. "Pads," he says. "Do you want to, um-- I mean, what actually _happened_?"

Sirius snatches his hand back. "I told you," he says. "I left, is all."

"There had to've been more to it than that, though," Remus insists. He rolls over onto his back, propping himself up on his elbows. "Was it--"

"I just left," Sirius repeats. Remus nods, his face all that fretful way it gets. The sun makes his eyes look stranger than they are: they're golden, in this light, and watchful even in repose, so that they make Sirius think of some skittish beast.

***  
He'd known when it came what sort of moment it was: it was a hard corner, a thick black line drawn through his life, and even then it had begun to make a mark on him like a burn, indelible, just beneath his skin. But it didn't feel significant just then. All it felt like was shaking hands and unreality, and something twisting and furling at the back of his throat till he thought he would choke on it. His mum's words hung over the table like smoke. _I'm disappointed to hear about your propensity for buggery, though it's hardly a surprise. Tell me, Sirius, is there any vice with which you won't degrade yourself?_ Frantically, he tried to work out who'd grassed him up. It could've been Bellatrix, or even Narcissa, as easily as Reg: he hadn't bothered much about keeping it quiet, round school. Sirius realized for the first time how he hadn't thought this through.

What he wanted to say was, _None of your fucking business, is it?_ He wanted to say, _Oh, but it's only degrading if you do it properly._ At the other end of the table, his mum was still babbling on: "It's as though you glory in filth, as though you take some depraved pride in bringing shame upon the name of Black." Already her words seemed to cling to the thing itself; to the flutter of memory behind his eyes, the wanting that moved like a living thing just beneath his skin.

Sirius swallowed. He opened his mouth. He believed, only for a moment, that he would do the right thing.

"Get fu-- I mean, get away. Where'd you hear that load of rubbish?"

"That is hardly the issue," his mother snapped, but her eyes flickered quickly toward Reg's end of the table. _Snitching fucker,_ Sirius thought grimly. "Of course, you _would_ deny--"

"Too right I would," Sirius interrupted. "Cause it's minging, isn't it, all that poofy stuff? Fucking sick, you ask me." One by one, in turn, he met each set of eyes round the table: his father's, cold and only vaguely interested; his mum's, beginning to waver in their conviction; Regulus's, a bit too innocent. "That lot's nothing but perverts."

There was a silence during which his mum's gaze caught on his. At last, she said, "The finest magical education in Europe, and you talk like some sort of... of _longshoreman_. Honestly, Sirius, I don't know that I could be any more ashamed of you if you _were_ a deviant."

Sirius let out a long breath. It was nothing to do with relief. _It isn't lying,_ he told himself, cause lying only counted when you had a choice. And he _didn't_ , he _couldn't_ , he couldn't let her take this, twist it all up till it was dirty and ruined. This line of thought seemed plausible enough, but his mouth tasted like guilt all the same.

***  
"I just left," Sirius says once more. He digs his bare toes into the earth, which feels clean and new though it's actual dirt. "It was brilliant, actually, my mum went spare-- d'you mind of that time in Transfiguration third year? When Prongs'n me snuck catnip into the first lesson, and tossed it at McGonagall while she was showing us her Animagus, remember? And she started running about the room yowling, and then she crawled up Snivelly's robes?"

Remus nods dubiously.

"That's how my mum got," Sirius reports. "She kept shouting about she was going to blast me off that ugly fucking tapestry, s'if I gave a toss." He runs his fingers through the grass, but it's the tapestry he feels: the heft of velvet, dust coming off on his hand. "Stupid bitch."

He realizes too late that this last is a tactical error. Remus'll have noted the viciousness of his tone, the way his words are all raw at the edges, like a cut healing over. "Padfoot," he says hesitantly. "Sirius, I--"

"It was a bit bad, though," Sirius tells him. "Only I kept wanting to break out laughing."

***  
 _It isn't lying._ He kept saying the words in his head, until they were nothing but sounds. _It isn't lying,_ and he hung out his bedroom window into the coolness of summer rain, cupping his fag behind his fingers to shield it from the greyness pissing down. He told himself how it wasn't lying. He told himself how they wouldn't understand.

The air outside the window was crisp as a slap, and he gulped it down gratefully, by the lungful. Number Twelve had a particular smell of its own, violets and candle wax and something else, something unwholesome like rot creeping into wood. It stuck to everything, like some dirty oil, till it was the taste in his mouth, till it clotted in his lungs.

 _It isn't lying._ He let his chin rest in the palm of his free hand. Under the skin of his wrist he could feel his pulse, doing something stupid and acrobatic, and a load of pliable, fragile-seeming bones. He winced. He thought how easily he'd folded, when it came to it. It wasn't what he would have expected, of himself.

***  
Remus has started making his prefect face, which only ever means trouble. "You're being tiresome," Sirius says, mean on purpose, not that Moony's ever impressed by that sort of thing.

"It's just, I need to know," Remus says. He pulls himself up so he's sitting with his knees against his chest, swipes his sandy fringe out of his eyes.

Sirius glowers. He gestures to the tree shading them, its branches all spidery over their heads. "Have you had an apple?" He arranges his face into a shite-eating grin. "They're dead good."

Remus squints. "They don't look ripe yet, Pads," he says dismissively. "I need to know. Was it because of-- I mean, did they find out--"

Sirius bites his lip.

***  
He dragged his trunk after him with one hand: it make a satisfying scratching noise against the polished steps. He couldn't work out why his mum was still shouting. They were so far beyond the point, now, when words could do anything one way or the other.

"I hope you don't imagine you'll be missed," she called down after him. "You've brought us nothing but infamy. Leaving now is the greatest favor you could grant us."

"Everyone's happy, then," Sirius muttered. His mum's laugh made him think of something being ripped in half.

" _Happy?_ How could I possibly be happy? Knowing what I've spawned; a blood traitor, an... an abomination." Sirius paused in the front hall. He told himself not to look back at her, and then did anyway. Her face was livid, her lips pulled back from her teeth. The picture in his mind was her as well; younger, her hair still all black, laughing in the real way, the way that means delight. He wondered if it was a false memory, and decided he hoped it was. He didn't want to believe there was anything here to lose.

He couldn't say, in that moment, why he'd told her. In somebody else it might simply have been the human urge for confession and absolution, but Sirius didn't reckon he had urges like _those_. He didn't like to think that it was some soppy romantic gesture on his part, but it was possible. Nor did he want to believe he did it to preserve his own idea of himself: _Sirius Black, right, brave as anything, couldn't give a fuck what people think_. But that was possible too. Maybe he just reckoned it was time to go.

And so there he was, already, at last, and before he knew what he was doing he'd thrown the door open, so that the wan glow of the streetlights spilled onto the parquet. He was kicking his trunk onto the stoop, and following after, he was closing his eyes as the door slammed shut behind him with an echoing boom suggestive of a curse.

When he opened his eyes again, the moon was hanging just above him, fat as flesh. It seemed to him in that moment a beacon. Its light was all silver and sharp, like knives.

***  
"Yeah," Sirius says. "It was cause of you. So I reckon you can't get cross anymore when I ask you to give me a bit of a--"

"Shut up," Remus says, only smiling a bit. "Really, though, Pads."

Moony's breath, it's gone all shaky. This close to, Sirius can see all his little details: odd pale eyes, crooked teeth, scattered freckles underneath the fine threads of scars. He wants to ask, _Why's it matter? I got out._ And then he understands why. He sees how if Remus thinks he's to blame, everything will be ruined for him.

He sees how everything will be ruined.

Sirius runs one hand through his hair. It still makes him jump, to touch it and find it pared away, barely long enough now to curl around his fingers. He thinks if he can work out why he cut it, he'll know what to do next, but his own mind is all cluttered and he can't find his way. He thinks it was something to do with being somebody new. He thinks it was to do with becoming someone whose actions he could trust. But he hasn't, he never will: he's hopeless at history. He will go on forever making the same mistakes.

"Why'd you think it was down to you?" he asks. The words feel all brittle in his mouth. "Cor, Moony, but you don't half fancy yourself. Don't be daft. It wasn't you." _It isn't lying_ , it isn't; only Remus would take the truth all wrong, he wouldn't just accept it and forget like he ought. _It isn't lying_ , and when Remus smiles down at him, Sirius almost believes things will be alright.


End file.
